Inca Gold (Dirk Pitt 12)

"Then why not stand off and blast her into submission?"

"Not wise to fire our guns and run the risk of sinking her with all her loot." Drake clapped a hand on Cuttill's shoulder. "Not to fear, Thomas. If I scheme a crafty plan, we'll save our powder and rely on stout Englishmen who are spoiling for a good fight."

Cuttill nodded in understanding. "You mean to grapple and board her then?"

Drake nodded. "We'll be on her decks before her crew can prime a musket. They don't know it yet, but they're sailing into a trap of their own making."

Slightly after three in the afternoon, the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion came about on a parallel course to the northwest again and ranged toward the Golden Hind's port quarter. Torres climbed the ladder to his ship's forecastle and shouted across the water.

"What ship are you?"

/> Numa de Silva, a Portuguese pilot Drake had appropriated after capturing de Silva's ship off Brazil, replied in Spanish, "San Pedro de Paula out of Valparaiso." The name of a vessel Drake had seized three weeks earlier.

Except for a few crew members who were dressed as Spanish sailors, Drake had hidden the mass of his men below decks and armed them with protective coats of mail and an arsenal of pikes, pistols, muskets, and cutlasses. Grappling hooks attached to stout ropes were stowed along the bulwarks on the top deck. Crossbowmen were secretly stationed in the fighting tops above the mainyards of the masts.

Drake forbade firearms in the fighting tops where musket fire could easily ignite the sails into sheets of flame. The mainsails were hauled up and furled to give the bowmen an unobscured line of vision. Only then did he relax and patiently wait for the moment to attack. The fact that his Englishmen numbered eighty-eight against the Spanish crew of nearly two hundred bothered him not at all. It was not the first time nor the last he would ignore superior odds. His renowned fight against the Spanish Armada in the English Channel was yet to come.

From his view, de Anton saw no unusual activity on the decks of the seemingly friendly and businesslike ship. The crew looked to be going about their duties without undue curiosity toward the Concepcion. The captain, he observed, leaned casually against the railing of the quarterdeck and saluted de Anton. The newcomer seemed deceptively innocent as it unobtrusively angled closer to the big treasure galleon.

When the gap between the two ships had narrowed to 30 meters (97 feet), Drake gave an almost imperceptible nod, and his ship's finest sharpshooter, who lay concealed on the gun deck, fired his musket and struck the Concepcion's steersman in the chest. In unison the crossbowmen in the fighting tops began picking off the Spaniards manning the sails. Then, with the galleon losing control of its steerageway, Drake ordered his helmsman to run the Hind alongside the bigger vessel's high sloping hull.

As the ships crushed together and their beams and planking groaned in protest, Drake roared out,

"Win her for good Queen Bess and England, my boys!"

Grappling hooks soared across the railings, clattered and caught on the Concepcion's bulwarks and rigging, binding the two vessels together in a death grip. Drake's crew poured onto the galleon's deck, screaming like banshees. His bandsmen added to the terror by beating on drums and blaring away on trumpets. Musket balls and arrows showered the dumbfounded Spanish crew as they stood frozen in shock.

It was over minutes after it began. A third of the galleon's crew fell dead or wounded without firing a shot in their defense. Stunned by confusion and fear they dropped to their knees in submission as Drake's crew of boarders brushed them aside and charged below decks.

Drake rushed up to Captain de Anton, pistol in one hand, cutlass in the other. "Yield in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England!" he bellowed above the din.

Dazed and incredulous, de Anton surrendered his ship. "I yield," he shouted back. "Take mercy on my crew."

"I do not deal in atrocities," Drake informed him.

As the English took control of the galleon, the dead were thrown overboard and the surviving crew and their wounded were confined in a hold. Captain de Anton and his officers were escorted across a plank laid between the two ships onto the deck of the Golden Hind. Then, with the characteristic courtesy that Drake always displayed toward his captives, he gave Captain de Anton a personally guided tour of the Golden Hind. Afterward he treated all the galleon's officers to a gala dinner, complete with musicians playing stringed instruments, solid silver tableware, and the finest of recently liberated Spanish wines.

Even while they were dining, Drake's crewmen turned the ships to the west and sailed beyond Spanish sea lanes. The following morning they heaved to, trimming the sails so that the ship's speed fell off but they maintained enough headway to keep the bows up to the seas. The next four days were spent transferring the fantastic treasure trove from the cargo holds of the Concepcion to the Golden Hind. The vast plunder included thirteen chests of royal silver plate and coins, eighty pounds of gold, twenty-six tons of silver bullion, hundreds of boxes containing pearls and jewels, mostly emeralds, and a great quantity of food stores such as fruits and sugar. The catch was to be the richest prize taken by a privateer for several decades.

There was also a hold full of precious and exotic Inca artifacts that were being transported to Madrid for the personal pleasure of His Catholic Majesty, Philip II, the King of Spain. Drake studied the artifacts with great astonishment. He had never seen anything like them. Reams of intricately embroidered Andean textiles filled one section of the hold from deck to ceiling. Hundreds of crates contained intricately sculpted stone and ceramic figures mingled with highly crafted masterpieces of carved jade, superb mosaics of turquoise and shell, all plundered from sacred religious temples of the Andean civilizations overrun by Francisco Pizarro and succeeding armies of gold-hungry conquistadors. It was a glimpse of magnificent artistry that Drake never dreamed existed. Oddly, the item that interested him most was not a masterwork of three-dimensional art inlaid with precious stones but rather a simple box carved from jade with the mask of a man for a lid. The masked lid sealed so perfectly the interior was nearly airtight. Inside was a multicolored tangle of long cords of different thicknesses with over a hundred knots.

Drake took the box back to his cabin and spent the better part of a day studying the intricate display of cords tied to lesser cords in vibrantly dyed colors with the knots tied at strategic intervals. A gifted navigator and an amateur artist, Drake realized that it was either a mathematical instrument or a method of recording dates as a calendar. Intrigued by the enigma, he tried unsuccessfully to determine the meaning behind the colored strands and the different disposition of the knots. The solution was as obscure to him as to a native trying to interpret latitude and longitude on a navigational chart.

Drake finally gave up and wrapped the jade box in linen. Then he called for Cuttill.

"The Spaniard rides higher in the water with most of her riches relieved," Cuttill announced jovially as he entered the captain's cabin.

"You have not touched the artworks?" Drake asked.

"As you ordered, they remain in the galleon's hold."

Drake rose from his worktable and walked over to the large window and stared at the Concepcion.

The galleon's sides were still wet several feet above her present waterline. "The art treasures were meant for King Philip," he said. "Better they should go to England and be presented to Queen Bess."

"The Hind is already dangerously overladen," Cuttill protested. "By the time another five tons are loaded aboard, the sea will be lapping at our lower gunports, and she won't answer the helm. She'll founder sure as heaven if we take her back through the tempest of Magellan Strait."

"I don't intend to return through the strait," said Drake. "My plan is to head north in search of a northwest passage to England. If that is not successful, I'll follow in Magellan's wake across the Pacific and around Africa."